Review of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

First, I will go with the obvious. The production is really polished and gives a lot of weight to many scenes throughout the series. The characters are good and varied and the action scenes are great. But for this review, I'd like to use the public's reaction to explain why I disagree with a lot of the hype around it. The first thing that I heard about this series was how emotional it was. Some people even compare it with shows like Violet Evergarden and Maquia. I will be clear about it: if this anime is supposed to be emotional then to me it has completely failed.To be honest, I even felt that it was actually the opposite at some point. The characters we see on screen are almost never emotionally implicated in any sort of thing that happens. Actually, most of them look more like emotionless sociopaths than anything. Let's take the main cast for example: Frieren's entire point is that her longevity makes her oblivious to the human existence, Fern shows like two different faces in all the anime and Stark is also completely oblivious to almost everything around him, showing lack of understanding of himself and other people. This is not an issue obviously, but I couldn't ever call anything in the show emotional with characters like these.

The second point I'd like to talk about is the dichotomy between the two main experiences this show gives. On the one hand, we have slice-of-life episodes with our main cast traveling around the world and interacting with the people there. I'll be honest, I'm not a big fan of slice-of-life and even though I think Frieren is clearly not the worst of this genre, I think there is something very shallow in its way of portraying the genre. To compare it with an anime I'm currently watching, I'll say that Aria portrays its world in a much more interesting way. With Frieren, I feel like I'm doing some kind of fetch quest in some random RPG, while with Aria I constantly feel amazed by how its world works and all the mysteries around it. Now if we take other episodic travel stories, I can say the same. Shows like Majo no Tabitabi for example shows much more variety and creativity in how it handles the topic of travel and the different things you can encounter. In the examples I've given, every episode feels like watching something else entirely while Frieren is too coherent and basic in its construction to really use the potential of this genre.

On the other hand, the action episodes feel like the most interesting part of the anime. There's something very raw and almost cruel with the way these are made and I feel like they're what the author does best. If the manga had given more importance to these moments and really went deeper with them, I feel like it would have been way better. But now I feel like these episodes are competing with the lackluster slice-of-life episodes, making the rhythm of the series feel like a roller-coaster between very high and very low stakes moments which feels weird to me.

To summarise, to me Frieren feels like a good fantasy story with some wasted potential here and there. It handles many story elements but treats most of them in the same way making some of them feel really underwhelming. To me it tries to do two completely different things at the same time. On one hand, it tries to be exhaustive and very open to new story elements, but on the other hand, it has a very extreme way of portraying its characters and their way of acting. It feels like it's being written by two authors, trying to tell two different stories, trying to make sense of what the other does while using the same characters in the same way and I can't really call that good storytelling.

Is this anime good? Most certainly. - Is it the best anime ever? Quite far from it.